Syndication

Letters to a Young Lawyer

I have been reading Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. Wisdom speaking to
youth is often such a treasure. While reading, I had an idea I share with you now. I invite you to post on your blog your Letter to a Young Lawyer. What would you most like to tell a lawyer just beginning the practice of law?

The Internet is a fine place for such a project. Electronically these letters can be around for many years for each generation of new lawyers to read. I imagine in a few years we may have new letters to write as we grow and our world changes. But for today, what do you want to say? What will you write in your Letter to a Young Lawyer?

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.—Robert Frost from "The Road Not Taken"

In the central place of every heart, there is a recording chamber; so long as it receives messages of beauty and hope, cheer and courage, you are young.(Rest of "On Youth.")

The cold flame burns within him'Til his skin's as cold as iceAnd the dues he paid to get hereAre worth every sacrifice.
—Baxter Black

Hear "Try To Remember"Try to remember the kind of SeptemberWhen life was slow and oh, so mellow.Try to remember the kind of SeptemberWhen grass was green and grain was yellow.Try to remember the kind of SeptemberWhen you were a tender and callow fellow.Try to remember, and if you remember,Then follow.

Comments

I found Letters to a Young Poet at mid-life, after I'd made the worst mistake of all -- subordinating what I truly loved to a legal career that, while expressing a great deal of me, left far too much of me outside the law's door.

So what I have to say to young lawyers MUST be more about the living of one's life than the pursuit of one's career, particularly when that career is as compelling, arduous and all-encompassing as the law can be.

So I give you Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet because I cannot say it any better.

"[F]ear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens.

"For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don't think we can deal with.

"[O]nly someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.

"[I]f we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. . .

[But] [w]e . . . are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us.

We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us.

"We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them.

"And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience."